Funk said her hope was to connect the dots between causes and effects within a person’s daily life.

“To connect the physiological, the mental and the emotional into a bit of a continuum, because there really is no real black and white separation from them,” she said. “If you start to understand that then you can understand that something physiological that happened in my body could be creating this emotion that is making me feel this way, and then those feelings make chemical messengers and hormones and then cause a physiological effect, and then it’s a chicken and an egg question.”

Funk said once those ‘dots’ or physiological, emotional and mental stresses are discovered, some small solutions can be found.

“Then if you start to feel a little bit better, you are interested in learning more,” she said. “Then you have the gumption and the energy to do other things to feel even better.”

“It even gives a type of empathy and understanding, whether it’s in a family or in a broader community,” she added. “When you know someone is suffering.”

Funk said there aren’t many triggers that can be avoided nowadays. “When you start to understand that something is a trigger and you become conscious of it and you learn how to respond to one or two of them, then you can mitigate that effect and you can potentially prevent a cascade,” she said. “The trigger creates the emotion, the fear creates the chemicals, and then it’s a positive feedback loop that creates more emotion.”

Funk said stress is the underlying foundation, but it isn’t the only cause.

“What has happened to our food supply?” she said. “It hasn’t given us the proper building blocks in our bodies to even make a lot of the hormones a lot of the time. If we don’t even have the proper building blocks because everything is refined and processed, even if you have the right state of mind or you have some of the right coping tools, if you don’t physiologically have that essentially fatty acid and that protein to make that hormone, then you cannot manifest the positive feeling or put the brakes on the fight-or-flight.”

A person’s past can also play a big role in their mental health. “The past contains elements of things that have happened to us that we haven’t known how to digest properly so to speak,” Funk said. “Then those things are easily triggered by the triggers. We react to something today as if it was the thing that happened to us 20 years ago that it’s reminding us of.”

Funk said she doesn’t really like the term ‘mental health’ because it can separate it from the other types of health, all of which are important for a person.

“It’s almost at the top of the pyramid,” she said. “Everything else has to go before and then it’s the last thing that tumbles over. Our minds are really strong and our minds can affect our body, and when that part goes… you know that there’s imbalance and dysfunction underneath when the mind starts to go.”

Funk said she sees something special happening in Morden and the community.

“The willingness to get it done and collaborate has been very encouraging and it makes me really excited to invest what I have to give here,” she said.